A Petri Dish clarifying his own thoughts while also analyzing the researcher. Exploration inspired by the book 'Being Different'. @IntegralUnity

Monday, March 17, 2014

Alternative History or Alternate History?

Alternate versus Alternative

I would've sworn that Wendy's book on the 'Hindus' was 'an alternate history'. I
rechecked the amazon book title, which said : 'alternative history'.
Why is this distinction important? Wendy, like most western academics born and brought up in English,
choose their words smartly. Grammarist.com (or any one of the popular grammar sites) notes:

The
implicit claim in Wendy's title is that her book does not seek to
replace what existed for thousands of years, but provides an alternative for
today's confused Hindus, 95% of who live in Nehruvian India. An India
where the assertion of being a proud practitioner of Hinduism, a
religion that offers genuine mutual respect instead of mere tolerance
like Abrahamic faiths, is considered "communal".

Fantasy is not a valid alternative

If
God gave Wendy Doniger lemons, you really do not want to know what she does with
it. One of the assumptions that Wendy's silly books relies on is that some Sanskrit words can have multiple, context-driven interpretations and she can freely choose
whatever suits her psychology ("stuck
in the anal-genital chakras"). Wendy's
Child Syndrome. Alternative does not mean "anything goes". Alternative re-tellings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata cannot be mapped into some Star-wars or Lord of the Rings type fantasy. An alternative driving route cannot send you to a different destination. A necessary
condition for any alternative interpretation of Hindu concepts and
methods is that it be dharmic. Hinduism, like Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism, is a dharmic thought system. Unfortunately, Wendy's approach is dharma-nirpeksha,
i.e. utterly indifferent to dharma. Dharma has
contextual interpretation that is neither frozen as a commandment or
fatwa, nor is it "anything goes" that degenerates into moral relativism.
Wendy & her children lack the cognitive capacity to comprehend such profundity. An adharmic alternative can only really
be a perverse substitute that seeks to wipe out rather than serve dharma. An alternate
history that mocks natives as savages is a precursor to cultural genocide.

Facts = Data aberrations = noisy signal

Shoddy scholarship is not just Wendy's problem. Mentally colonized
Indian intellectuals (sepoys) have shown that they are not just clueless but
also careless. The so-called intellectual output toward creating an alternate history, produced by an entire
generation of India's leftists, from Romila Thapar and Amartya Sen, down to those lower in the ranks
like Ramachandra Guha, etc., is defined by mediocrity: sloppy research, use of
meaningless adjectives, unquantifiable claims, and a lack of scientific
rigor. Unlike scientific and engineering journal papers, here the conclusions come first, and the reasoning is whatever is
necessary to justify the conclusion. There appears to be some kind of a mental condition that fails to recognize that facts are
... facts and that if something happened, it did happen (some so-called 'right wing' columnists too have fallen prey to this). But no. It is possible
for sepoys to time-travel and alter what happened. And it is justifiable to do so because such facts are merely an aberration, a blip in the radar that does not, and should not be allowed to, derail their grand narrative.

The Invader Avatar Theory

(update March 2015: Refer Rajiv Malhotra's 2015 Jaipur Lit Fest video for this)
If
the ancient Indian civilization is advanced, it cannot have a Hindu
origin since Hinduism is backward. So it must have come from outside.
So add a "n" to Arya and invent the Aryan invaders. Then a succession of "invader avatars" who show up every few centuries to give India what it needed, from Vedas to Mughlai cuisine to sports to liberalism. Any factual evidence, be it genetic, linguistic,
archaeological, astronomical, economic data, which contradicts the IA theory is but an
isolated violation, a series of coincidences that do not invalidate the overall
narrative. If Hindu leaders perform social service, then it cannot have
Hindu origins and must have been borrowed from the Christian west or
Islam, because Hinduism is fully of exotic mysticism and represents a self-centered, out-worldly quest for Moksha,
and does not have or even require philanthropy. If Nehruvian India
failed, it is because of Hinduism and their "Hindu rate of growth", not
because of Nehru's corrupt Stalinist policies that has ruined the nation. If
unimpeachable data is shown that dharma civilization was a dominant in major measurement indices for most of the thousand-plus years prior to
colonization, this too is an aberration - some white noise,
and the overall signal-to-noise ratio of their IA theory is strong. If Marxist-Leninist-Maoist politics has produced untold misery all over the
world, and yet is blindly imported by sepoys and used to destroy the economy and society of Kerala and Bengal in India, that too is an
aberration, and merely improper implementation of a sophisticated IA concept. Hinduism cannot be reformed by a Sankara because Hinduism
is fossilized. If it is reformed, then of course, it cannot be Hinduism, which
by definition is fossilized, so this has to be some neo-Hinduism that is the invention
of a nationalist-minded Vivekananda after learning from the USA (read 'Indra's Net;).
Hinduism, like India the nation, never existed until recently, yet this same
Hinduism, even without existing, miraculously managed to destroy
Buddhism and Jainism, as Arun Shourie pointed out recently. If a Babasaheb
Ambedkar who spoke up for Dalits against persecution is venerated, the fact that he
became Buddhist and remained true to his dharma (like Arun Shourie) and
even wrote in praise of Advaitic Hinduism and 'Hindutva', is dismissed as an
aberration.

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

If Islamic genocidal maniacs like Aurangazeb killed more
than four million Indians, that too is an aberration, since
he was more like Shakespeare who went wrong only towards the end of his
reign when office-pressures were mounting (credit: William Dalrymple). If Tipu massacred or forcibly converted hundreds of thousands of Hindus,
then that is an aberration, since he was secular on the average because
he left a couple of Hindu temples intact (read this recent book for reasons). Balance! Reminds me of Pam Shriver who described a 0-6, 1-6 tennis match against Martina Navratilova: "it was a very balanced game. I broke serve once, and held once". Detailed
first-hand accounts by neutral Westerners and Europeans against such
fundamentalist maniacs who've committed mass-murder of Indians cannot be accepted since they are biased. Heck,
blow-by-blow accounts by personal biographers of these tyrants are not
acceptable because they don't really mean what they saying, unless they
are speaking of non-homicidal contributions, if any. However, the neo-Hindu
oxymoron propagated by western 'missionaries in mufti' like Paul Hacker
and Ursula King is perfectly balanced and acceptable to Ramachandra
Guha, Ashutosh Varshney, Pankaj Mishra (who won a $150K sepoy Baksheesh recently), Romila Thapar, etc.. The stuff of Wendy and children from the west is lauded and praised as a
scholarly alternative. The racist colonial missionary myth of "Aryan-Dravidian" is
acceptable. Anything said against the Hindus in any book, by anybody is
acceptable; neutrality, objectivity, fact-checking be damned. The conclusion drives the cherry-picking of data. Such is the world of
social "science" and humanities! If no data remains after
all this pruning, then their IA theory is proposed
as something that actually happened, and taught to Indian school kids to create the next generation of mentally colonized Indians.

In
every instance, it is clear that the aim is not to provide an
alternative picture, but an alternate narrative that is written to erase evidence and replace it with pet theories. What is the mental condition that drives sepoys to such dishonesty?

(The basis for some of the info interpreted above is derived from the works of original Indian thinkers, including Rajiv Malhotra, Arun Shourie, and S. Gurumurthy)

Why?

The
Islamic mauraders and Western colonizers murdered, raped and pillaged India for
centuries. Yet the vast majority of India - the hundreds of millions of
ordinary Indians held on to their dharma. They endured mind-boggling
physical torture and mental trauma, yet their spirit was intact, their 'Mano bal' (morale) remains alive, thanks
to dharma, the very basis of anti-fragility. As Ajit Doval asks and answers: "When is a war over? The war is over only after we win". The Hindus have protected their itihasa and dharma, and with the guidance of Rishis like Rajiv Malhotra and fact-driven thinkers like Gurumurthy, they will continue until they prevail. The only irreversibly damaged people? The sepoys. They rejected dharma, thereby
allowing their intellects to be repeatedly molested, their deepest thoughts
to be violently penetrated by Hinduphobic thinkers. Consequently, their deflowered minds have collectively produced ZERO original, truly
alternative Indian thought, but given birth to tons of mutilated, bastardized alternate
ideas of India and Hinduism that are dead on delivery. I have only pity for sepoys. Truly tragic victims of colonialism.

1 comment:

Dharampal

pic source: http://www.samanvaya.com/dharampal)

Gandhi's Hind Swaraj

Aurobindo

S. L. Bhyrappa

Original Indian Thinker & Author

Encouraging words from Sri Rajiv Malhotra

"This is the kind of scholar I have hoped to discover through mywritings and inspire. He has immersed himself into the history centrism thesis,then emerged with his own creative manthana based on it. He proposes novel ways of looking at it. All the blogs listed on the right margin are the product of original hard work and worth reading. My thanks go to him"